Talk:Featured Articles/Discussion

We are currently looking to change the process for Featured Articles. Since our membership has been growing, and more and more really great are being written, Articles are beginning to overlap. For example, today I put up User:Careax's excellent Scooter page, and on the same day, Libertarian got its required 5 votes. Dilemma. So, in the interest of fairness, one idea is to make the Featured Articles get at least one week on the front page. If no other articles are voted Featured at that time, then it will get a longer stay.

Anyway, please post any and all ideas you might have to improve this process. This is going to probably be a constant problem as the site continues to grow, but it is not a bad problem to have. So, in closing, please be patient while we work things out. Thanks. --MC Esteban™ 22:48, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Just brainstorming: I wonder if there's a way to make the "features box" work like a template that rotates the features, like the truthiness slogans we run on the front page (above the article count)? That way, we could have more than one "new" feature at a time. I don't know whether people would even want this, but it seems like one possible solution that wouldn't create a backlog. We could also maybe work this so that we just kept a certain number in queue (five, or potentially even the ten in the sidebar), so that if we didn't have any new "features" for a while, the features box wouldn't look stagnant (because it wouldn't look like we had the "same" feature up there for a month, etc.).

Another potential solution I could see would be to just make the box bigger, move stuff around on the Main Page, and put up more than one at a time? Again, I don't know if people would go for this, just trying out idears.

Thanks for bringing this up for discussion. And many, many thanks for all the work you have been doing to archive the older features in order to open them up for editing - I know that has to be a ton of work! --thisniss 01:38, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

That's a good idea. But having multiple current featured articles at once sounds a little complicated to me. It makes my solitary brain cell hurt. :-( And I'd be wary of making the featured article box any bigger, as it's already pretty big. Of course, you're idea of moving/shrinking stuff would probably resolve that concern.

Another possibility would be to allow a backlog of winning featured articles to build up to a certain number (maybe 4 or 5), and then lock down the nominations page temporarily. A big message on the top could say that it will be open for nominations again once the backlog has been reduced (something funnier than that obviously though). Once the pending winners count goes down to 1 the page is reopened.

The advantage of this approach is that it keeps the process orderly, especially with the policy of featuring an article for at least once per week. The downside is that it might discourage people from nominating. But I think that's unlikely. I think this wiki has easily passed that critical mass of active users now, where things like featured articles will not stagnate again. I feel a bigger disadvantage could be that it might not be a good long-term fix.

Anyway, just my thoughts. :-) --Careax 16:57, 15 April 2007 (UTC) (p.s. thanks for the kind words about and/or voting for Scooter - as a reward you'll get tickets to the world premiere, which will be taking place in Crawford, Texas!)

I like the idea of featured articles staying for a set number of days. I'm not sure that number needs to be a week - and in some cases, like the Easter article, Easter had come and gone and the article remained - it just looked like we were slow on the uptake. I don't see a problem with a que of featured articles on-deck and I think when an article is particularly timely or has an expiration date (like Easter) then maybe we should look at the articles in the que and promote one over the other based on this. I think we want the featured articles to be "relevant" in some way. So the Iraq War, would be more relevant than the Vietnam War, but less relevant than, say, an article on famous metaphors. Just my 2 copper... --Alethic Logic 16:17, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

The real issue with the Features Nomination process, in my experience, has been that it seems to ebb and flow so much. When we all have a spurt of creativity, we get a bunch of articles nominated at once, and then when we're all busy (say, for example, when all the folks who are in school are off taking finals...) then we have a period where not a lot of new "feature-length" articles are getting written and/or nominations and voting seem to be down. So at one end, articles don't seem to have "enough" time, and at the other, they seem to spend way too much time on the front page. I believe the solution is to actually decide on a time span - for example, a Feature will stay on the Front Page for "at least three, but no more than ten days" (these are arbitrary, it can be whatever we decide seems reasonable). This should solve the problem of the "queue" - it shouldn't matter how many articles are nominated at once, because we will have a system in place for rotating through them.

If there are no "new" features at the end of the "10 days" (or whatever length) for the last new Feature's "run," then what? Well, then I believe that rather than simply keeping this article up on the Main Page until something new gets Featured, we should start cycling back through the older features. This will have a few advantages, as I see it: 1) It will keep the Main Page from looking stagnant - I really, really hate it when we have the same "Feature" up for more than maybe two weeks at the most. It does make us look "slow on the uptake" (and not just with seasonal pieces, like Easter, but in general). 2) It will mean that some of the pieces that got "rushed" during a spate of features (pieces that got a "shorter run") will get to spend more time on the Main Page when they come back around. 3) It gives us a chance to revisit our old Features, which, you know, should be some of our best articles. So... them's my two cents (keep going this way and Wikiality.com will be rich. Rich I tell you!!) --thisniss 16:40, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I think we should discontinue permanently locking the editing of featured pages. I do believe that locking a winning page for brief bit is appropriate in order to (1) preserve the page in all its raging glory and (2) prevent unholy vandalism that unnecessarily follows on a newly faddish page. However, locking "featured pages" deprives forthcoming generations of thoughtful additions to worldly knowledge. Indeed, like Catholic Church's dogma, these "apples of our eyes" need to be perpetually shined, polished, fertilized, and sometimes pruned to maintain divine status. By locking our pages, are we no different that the Amish, who have arbitrarily chosen to freeze time in the 1830's?

Methinks a 30 day edit-lock should be in place from the time an article is featured, after which, improvements should be allowed.

I agree 100% with Wskitche's suggestion. A lot of the Featured Articles tend to be topics or subjects that Stephen revisits or continually exapnds on and we need to be able to update them accordingly. --El Payo 05:28, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

I also believe that there may be pages that haven't been considered for Featured status (or that I wouldn't personally consider nominating) for this very reason. With the current system in place, I wouldn't nominate a page that I didn't think could be "locked" - which basically rules out most of the pages that are based on topics that Stephen talks about a lot (like the gays, not that this particular pages is currently in "Feature" shape, but it could be... you get the hypothetical here). While I understand the desire to lock a featured page so that new users will see the truthy version that won the featured status, I also feel the frustration of a static version which seems antithetical to an ongoing wiki development.

Maybe there is another compromise available, too? The "30 Day Rule" seems like a good one, but perhaps we could also keep an archive of featured pages in their "Featured Form"? I don't know if that's even possible, or if that would just be getting into a bunch of unnecessary superfluous pages. Just brainstorming.--thisniss 03:14, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

I like Thisniss's suggestion of archiving winning featured page (and linking to it from the main page) and keeping the original page "hot." I don't think this would be too difficult, we could just link to the archived history page. Lets keep talking about this and change our Amish ways.
--Wskitche 18:16, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

We could keep the article in it's locked featured state linked on the front page after the 30 day archival as well. We would include a link from that to the editable page, and vice versa. 30 day limit sounds good to me. --MC Esteban™ 21:15, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

I see the truthiness slogans on the front page aren't rotating any more. :| But anyway, thisniss's idea sounds good to me. :) In terms of the Wiki markup, conceptually it just involves using the <choose><option> thingy. The only problem I can see, is that someone must still keep track of when each article should be retired from the rotation. Bi 15:44, 15 April 2007 (UTC)